People do good because they are
human,
not because they are religious!

Do not give God any credit for the good they do, they did it!

DIVINE INSPIRATION OF ANY BOOK (NEVER MIND THE
BIBLE !) IS IMPOSSIBLE

The Church regards a book allegedly created by God through men as infallible on
faith and morals. That book is the Bible and its words though not dictated by
God all the time (though there are many examples of dictation) are regarded as
being the same as God's words. Even those who deny verbal dictation hold
that even if the Bible is not all the words of God its words in practice amount
to the same thing as being God's actual words and that this is God's teaching. The
inspiration of the Bible is best thought of as follows: The Bible is what God
would write if he were holding the pen. This is not dictation but dictation or
not, the Bible is as good as a dictated Bible would be.
God is the principle origin and author of holy writ. Whatever you are to
think about this the teaching is clear about one thing. Even if not
dictated by God the book still has the same authority as it would have if it
were.

"Thus says the Lord" appears a lot in the Bible but
especially in the first five books, the savage Torah where God gives one
barbaric command after another. That is significant. The expression
in the Bible is not the author reporting what God said as in hearsay. It is the
author getting dictation from God about what was said. It is idolatry, the
evil of bibliolatry, to extol such a dreadful and cruel volume as the word of
God or even as the top special book. The religious use of such a book is
gravely vile. Believers should worry that there
might be a God who will be furious at that.

Greek philosophy, particularly that of Socrates, Parmenides and Empedocles was
allegedly given to these men by divine beings.Plato argued that the gods guided Socrates in his thinking and his
philosophy. The notion of information coming from a god is nothing new.

It is felt that if God dictated the Bible then there is no point in studying
its context and its times or its text. But there is nothing wrong with God
speaking to a time within the context of the time!! It does not matter who
or what dictates anything - it still needs studying.

Divine inspiration was a popular concept in Bible times so it is no surprise
if the Bible claims to be divinely inspired or perhaps the only divinely
inspired scripture.

The Bible in the Old Testament often uses Thus Says the
Lord and emphasises the importance of the words being God's. God would not
put his words in a book amid material that might not be divinely inspired at
all. That raises the question, are the words really God's or have they
been basterdised and even invented? Though believers say the Bible is all
equally from God it is hard to deny that the most important bits would be the
dictated bits. God would have meant those to be taken with outmost
seriousness.

THE THEORIES

Christians claim that the Bible has God for its ultimate author. Some Bible
books say they are God's books. The apostle Paul wrote that all scripture is
breathed out by God and enough for a thorough training in Christian life - in
other words it is 100% from God. Christians say that somehow it is 100% from man
too. But it is clear that the main thing being claimed is infallibility - the
Bible does not err for God does not err.

If God wants to write a book but doesn’t write it himself but does it through
men then theologians say he can do one or more of the following.

Control the men like robots - the dictation theory.

Inspire the men and let them write it down their way - the illumination theory.

Or he can work with them in such a way that they freely write without compulsion
but still write with him so that he is the author as well - the verbal theory.

We will examine these options to see if any of them make sense. We will see that
none of them do! Divine inspiration is a trick to get you to accept the ideas of
men as the ideas of God. You obey the men under the illusion that it is really
God you obey.

All of the theories imply that there must be no doctrinal or moral or factual
error in the Bible. The notion that God used one or more of those methods but
has suspended inspiration when the author writes about history or science is a
cop-out. Its an excuse for trying to believe in a Bible that has historical and
scientific errors. It is teaching that the Bible is partly inspired. If every
religion did that, it would follow that we have all those rival scriptures and
have no way of finding out which one is really from God.

Against this you have the theory of plenary inspiration. It asserts the Bible is
entirely the word of God.

Karl Barth claimed that the Bible is not God's word but when you read it God
inspires you to learn from it. This teaching contradicts the Bible assertion
that it is the word of God. And it would follow that what you feel like
believing is to be taken as the word of God! What a recipe for chaos in the
psychiatric unit!

LITERALISM

It is said that nobody said the Bible was factually correct and without error
until a Protestant book made this claim in the 1600's (page 25, Speaking
Christian, Marcus J Borg, SPCK, London, 2011).

It is stated that Luther was not a Bible literalist for he considered dropping
the epistle of St James and the Book of Revelation from the Bible (ibid page
25). But that proves nothing. A Bible literalist might think the other books are
literally true and could be excising a book or two because they do not belong in
the Bible.

Luther is said to have not been a literalist because he refused to take the
Bible literally when it spoke of God walking in the Garden of Eden. But if he
merely thought this was the authors poetic way of saying God was in the Garden
then he was still a literalist. A literalist does not necessarily have to
pretend that there is no poetry or symbolism in his Bible. The
historical-metaphorical approach is opposed to literalism and is said to be a
recent development like literalism is (page 26, ibid).

It is the case that Christianity though it never talked about literalism in
practice it was literalistic. Literalism was always the policy. The Church
always called the Bible the word of God. Word means communication. By
implication, the word is the words of God. Jesus claimed absolute infallibility
and spoke of his words as being the unerring message of God in the gospel of
John. This gospel calls him the Word of God meaning that as a person he was the
word of God because his words were the words of God.

SPIRITUAL AND VERBAL

Christianity, Islam, Mormonism and many other cults have books that they get
their doctrines from which are reputedly inspired by God.

The theologians say that there are two kinds of inspiration. One is spiritual,
God putting the thoughts in you letting you find the words yourself, and the
other is actually inspiring the words of a text, or putting the words in your
mind.

In the spiritual variety, if God makes me realise that adultery is wrong then he
can leave it up to me to express this in my own words. If I put it down badly he
will keep at me until I do it right or get somebody else to do it. The most
striking absurdity in this is that a sensible God would choose good writers but
much of the Bible is so badly and unclearly written that even the author of
Second Peter complained about Paul’s epistles.

The spiritual theory is most popular among those who feel that there are minor
errors of grammar and history in the word of God. They say that this does not
make God a liar for he did not inspire the words but the meaning and his purpose
was to give us light in faith and morals.

If a book claims to be inspired then it must be held that it is saying that God
has sanctioned every word in it for you cannot separate the words from the
meaning. They are different but not separate. A blue plastic toy is a toy and it
is blue. Blue and toy and different but are the same thing when you can’t have
one without the other. The thought cannot be conveyed accurately without the
words so the inspiration of the Bible must be plenary (page 19, A Summary of
Christian Doctrine).

The spiritual or mental theory is indeed a mental theory for God must inspire
you to write some of the words for most thoughts come to you in the form of
words and you mentally talk to yourself in words all the time. The theory
implies that God has to inspire the words because he needs some control over the
words used to get the idea expressed clearly and properly. If I write, “Adultery
is bad”, because I feel or sense that God has told me it is sinful then that is
no use for I could mean that it is unpleasant but not immoral. God will have to
tell me to put the word immoral where bad is. God approves of the words of the
text which is all that matters though some claim that they don’t accept that he
does. The theory of spiritual inspiration is ridiculous so verbal inspiration is
the only possibility it seems.

When God inspires some words then he might as well inspire the rest. Why not?

The universal Christian consensus that God let the Bible writers write as they
pleased but without error or inserting what God did not want them to include so
that the words of scripture are as much the words of man as they are God (page
9, Know What You Believe; page 21, Set My Exiles Free). The Bible does not
sanction this absurdity. It’s a contradiction though religion says it’s a
paradox.

When we need to believe in a paradox to believe in the Bible’s divine
inspiration there is something wrong. You cannot assume that the paradox exists
on the grounds that the Bible shows evidence of divine inspiration and was also
freely composed by man. It is irrational to assume paradoxes where there is no
need for there is no shortage of philosophies that have contradictions that they
pretend are paradoxes. Better to assume that they were like divine typewriters
or if the Bible teaches the paradox then to scrap the Bible. God should not make
paradoxes where there need to be none and if the Bible requires one like this
then it is not the word of God at all. Also paradoxes are serious business for
they might be contradictions so you need absolute proof that the seemingly
conflicting components of a paradox are true. For example, you must prove that
the Bible is inspired by God first before you can believe in the paradox of
inspiration. The Bible cannot provide that kind of evidence. There is a paradox
in it regarding divine sovereignty and human freedom (page 28, Know What You
Believe). To avoid a paradox, divine sovereignty or human freedom or both should
be denied for paradoxes are inherently undesirable and are only tolerated under
extreme conditions. You would need to prove that God controls all things as
divine sovereignty claims as much as you can free will. You cannot so God, and
God must be in control of all things and be causing them to come to be to be
God, has to be done away with for to forsake his sovereignty dogma is to forsake
theism.

The Bible authors could have been used by God like typewriters which felt free
but who were not. This is not refuted by the fact that the authors studied and
did research for what they had to write. God got them to know what to write and
then he gave them the words to write with. This view is simple and avoids the
improbable mystery of how God could get free agents to freely write only what he
wants.

Why can’t he get us to freely do what he wants all the time? The theory
contradicts the existence of God which depends on us having free will to get God
off the hook for doing evil. It is blasphemous to teach this inspiration mystery
as being true when the Bible says we are biased against holiness which is true.
It is blasphemy because if God could control us without imposing on our free
will then he should not let us sin so much. The Bible can’t be trusted when the
devil’s men wrote it freely.

The Bible assumes that we have commonsense so it implies that we should not
create mysteries where none need be. No verse says that people were free to
write what God wanted. Implication is one of the ways that the Bible says it had
to have been written by men used like typewriters.

Any sinful fraud could say that God made them write new scripture. Trusting
their work is not a matter of trusting God but them even if God did write
through them for we don’t know the difference. There is a lot of merit in
claiming God controlled you to write, but if the person claims to be free we
have far less reason to trust them. Besides, you only have the fraud’s word for
it that he was not free so it doesn’t help much. But it makes more rational
sense to believe the person who denies his freedom and that God was really the
only author. We don’t have any affidavits from Bible writers that they were not
free when they wrote so we have no right to believe that God wrote the Bible.

Spiritual inspiration needs verbal inspiration to work. If you want to believe
God wrote books then believe the authors were his typewriters.

It may be objected that any scripture allegedly verbally inspired by the same
God would have the same style but all such books show different styles showing
that the books can’t be or claim to be verbally inspired. But God could imitate
the writer’s style. If he had not the sceptics would say that the New Testament
or whatever was forged by one author. God is not like humans that he tends to
stick to the same style.

THE MYTH APPROACH

The spiritual theory of inspiration often means that the Bible stories are
thought to be a divinely inspired myth. Here is an example. We read in the book
of Genesis that God made Eve from Adam's rib. The reader might say that God is
only indicating that woman needs man and the literal story is not to be taken
seriously. The story is only a parable.

But the story could have been meant literally. There is no hint given that we
are to impose our own meaning on it.

The myth approach leads people to invent their own interpretations and declare
them the word of God. Only a hypocrite says he believes in the Bible as the word
of God and then makes his interpretations the real word of God. That is the
person that scoffs at the believer in the literal interpretation and labels him
a fundamentalist! The worst fundamentalist is the one who says his fantasies
about the Bible word of God are the Bible word of God. Better to be the humble
literalist!

Think about God's alleged true meaning, that woman needs man. The story would
indicate that better by saying that God made Eve from Adam's heart. Why a rib?
Its an insult to woman to say that God had to make her from something that could
be done without such as rib! And no women believe that men and women need to be
bodily or genetically related. And Adam had to be asleep for the rib to be
taken. Thus he missed out on a chance to see this creature being built from a
part of him. He had to depend on God telling him that he made him from him. That
makes this a bit more impersonal.

The myth approach promotes the fundamentalism of telling people lies about the
Bible.

CLAIMS TO BE VERBALLY INSPIRED

The Bible claims to be verbally inspired in several places. Here is the main
text. As scripture is entirely inspired it follows that the words are inspired.

2 Timothy 3:16-17, All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching,
for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of
God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. New American Standard Bible
(NASB) - literally it says that all scripture is breathed out by God

The Bible claims that every word in it is a word from God.

The writings and writings are made of words claim to be
the very breath of God. Other texts show light on this subject. In
Exodus 4:12 we read, “Go, and I, even I will be with your mouth, and teach you
what you are to say”. Ezekiel is told “Son of man, go to the house of
Israel. Take into your heart all my words which I shall speak to you, and listen
closely . . . and speak to them” (Ezekiel 3:4, 10-11).

1 Thessalonians 2:13 says that the word of the apostles
is really the word of God and is not to be accepted as a human message. This is
pretty clear that liberal Christians who water down the Bible's teaching into
something vague and open to too wide of an interpretation are frauds.

The Bible in several places gives Gods teaching and
starts off with, "Thus says the Lord." It is wrong to take the text as
reporting what God says. It is but it is more than that. It is also
claiming that God is choosing the words that the human author is putting down.

INSPIRED MEANS WHOLLY INERRANT

We can prove that if a book is really inspired it must be fully inerrant. God is
the principal author of the Old and New Testaments and because of that they must
be true which requires that they be without error or contradiction (page 19, Set
My Exiles Free).

Three Theories about extent of infallibility

If you believe in Bible inspiration or infallibility then there are only three
options.

1. You may believe that the Bible is right on all its religious teaching but may
be wrong in reporting other things.

2. You may believe that the Bible teaches false religious doctrine and is
infallible only in the doctrine that you need to know to enter Heaven.

3. You may hold that the Bible is free from religious and every other kind of
error.

Finding out which one of these we have to accept if we believe in the Bible
should prove interesting.

Infallible on doctrine alone

If we are going to believe a book that errs when it reports miracles we ought to
believe every miracle tale with flaws including the dubious miracles of the
Hindu man-god Sai Baba. It would be the sin of irrationality and bigotry not to.

We should all be aware that it is the vice of credulity to believe in stories
about miracles when the book that tells them errs. It would be credulous to
believe in the doctrines of an erring Bible and it would be putting guesses in
front of what God may really teach.

If I rewrote the Bible and expunged the errors and contradictions and added new
bits I would have a bigger right to call my bastardised Bible the word of God.

If I wrote a book that seemed devoid of error it would have a stronger claim to
be God’s word.

If the theory is right then we have no evidence that the Bible is reliable and
so we will be agnostic in relation to it if we have any integrity. If it errs in
non-religious matters then we cannot trust its doctrines either. Only a crank
would believe in a book that errs when it speaks of miracles that are
questionable. It would be the vice of gullibility. It would be blasphemous to
proclaim a fallible book the word of God. Anyone who writes a better holy book
would have more right to call his work the only word of God. If one should all
should so God would want confusion. The Church of Rome and the other Churches
that have abandoned Christianity in their biblical theology are just saying that
the Bible is the word of God because they want it to be and that is not on.

We cannot claim that if the Bible withstands philosophical investigation it must
be inspired for lots of books can do that. Wisdom only means that the writers
were wise not that they were inspired. We would not need scripture if we could
get by with philosophy.

For some Roman Catholics to argue as they do today that Moses did not write the
Torah, that the story of the garden of Eden was a revision of an ancient
Babylonian myth as was the flood and Jonah was not swallowed alive by a whale
and lived to tell the tale all of which contradicts Jesus who swallowed each and
every story hook, line and sinker according to the Bible (Matthew 12,24:37; Mark
10:3; John 6:49, 7;19) and then to say that the pope is infallible is really to
make the pope more infallible than Jesus (page 8, The Church of Rome and the
Word of God). It is ludicrous to suggest that Jesus could have been wrong about
these things and still have been the plenary revelation of God because somebody
like that would be unconvincing. Also, Jesus never said that he took the stories
as myths and since everybody in his day took them literally he most probably did
too so they have to accuse Jesus of error. And it would be doctrinal error as
well because the Bible presents the stories that are universally rejected by
critics now as miracles. If the flood never happened and was a myth so was the
resurrection.

God would not inspire a Bible that errs for he can easily inspire the authors to
make no errors at all. The theory is just nonsense by those who won’t admit that
the Bible is unworthy of credence.

Infallible only on essentials?

Christians agree that you don’t need to know every doctrine to enter Heaven. But
you do need to know that you are a sinner, that repentance is necessary for
salvation, that God is love and that Jesus is God and your merciful saviour. You
can believe in all that God has revealed without knowing much about what he
revealed. Only deliberate unbelief is a sin.

Some Christians and many Catholic theologians teach that Bible infallibility is
limited only to those basic doctrines. They delight to prove that the Bible
commands many immoral things.

This theory makes it impossible to disprove the inspiration of the scriptures of
any other religion of a book for it could be said of them that they are only
infallible when they preach the doctrines that need to be known for salvation
too and when they make sense. It makes religion arbitrary. Religion would just
be picking one inspired book or system out of many to obey just because it feels
like it.

The theory takes away any hope you have of proving that you have evidence for
your faith. It makes faith blind. And blind faith is certainly a grave evil.

Now God cannot be comprehended by human nature. His ethics often cannot be
either. The theory takes away God's role as teacher and puts the opinions of men
in his place. They have to pick the doctrines they imagine are required for
salvation like tickets out of a hat.

The theory puts you at the mercy of theologians and popes. It has to endorse all
kinds of slavery for it presupposes that enslaving and dominating are lawful.

This theory is the worst of the bunch. Who decides what the essentials are?

Is verbal inspiration the one?

We have in mind the view that God inspired all the words of the Bible here. This
doctrine is sometimes called plenary inspiration.

God must have inspired the very words of the Bible if it is inspired because the
alternative theories are hopelessly inadequate.

The Bible would need to be totally inerrant if miracles prove that God has
spoken like it says for then its miraculous inerrancy shows it’s true.

The biblical view is that there is no error or deception in the Bible because it
is wholly God’s word.

That this must be the true view if the Bible is God’s word is clear from the
fact that the previous two, which deny full inerrancy, make no sense.

There are many books that pretend to prove that there isn’t a single
contradiction in the Bible. They say all those authors writing over a long
period of time and being so different from each other and without disagreeing
with one another is a clear miracle. This miracle for such a complex book with
such a complex history shows that it is God’s book. To merit belief the book
must be a miracle for signs are necessary. Or so we are told. The compilers of
the Bible had long enough to pick out what books and alleged prophecies matched
what went before. They had a big enough selection. They weren’t always right but
if they had been there is no need to suppose there was a miracle.

A miracle Bible is necessary – to expect us to believe in the miracles it speaks
of it would have to be a miracle itself. The Bible is not a miracle for the
believers engage in tactics of making contrived reconciliations of
contradictions and ignore contradictions that they cannot refute.

If God has inspired the Bible then he has done so to prove that he cannot lie so
that we can have rational confidence in him.

If you get confused and wrongly think that you have this faith without the Bible
it is no good to God for you are not thinking straight so any prayers and
requests for salvation you make are invalid because your consent is invalid.
Belief in Bible infallibility is necessary for faith which is necessary for
salvation.

The Bible claims to be God’s word which is a denial that it merely contains it
(2 Timothy 3:16). It is infallible if it is for God cannot err for he knows and
rules all creation.

ALL SCRIPTURES ERR

The wonderful thing about verbal inspiration is that all you have to do is prove
one grammatical mistake, obscurity, historical or scientific error or
contradiction in their printed idol and their entire religious construct
collapses. Atheists must encourage religion to restore the theory, which will
make their work of destroying faith a lot easier. Religions that abandoned it
only did so because they were afraid of the critics and wanted to cover up the
stupidity of their doctrines.

The gates of Hell have prevailed over the Vatican and her prostitute daughter
Churches so they are not the true Church (Matthew 16:18).

They are antichrist for they deny faith in the Father and the Son by denying the
Scriptures whether they realise it or not (1 John 2:22,23). The Catholic Church
is not a Christian communion and neither is any other Church that shares her low
opinion of scripture.

Remember the absurdity of any theory other than plenary verbal inspiration. Any
book of so-called scripture, be it the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or the Book of
Mormon, is to be used to light the fire if it contains so much as a single
mistake.

The doctrine of plenary inspiration forces Christianity to beg the question.
“The Bible is always right”, they say, “because it is infallible and it is
infallible because it is always right”. That is fanaticism. How do you know that
when the gospels say Jesus was offered sour wine on the cross that they were
right? Maybe somebody misremembered or misinterpreted what they saw? Only the
Devil would call for faith based on such bad logic. Logically, the Christians
can only say that most statements in the Bible are right and suspend judgment on
the rest for they can’t verify everything. That is true even if they can verify
that the authors of the Bible were sincere. But they arrogantly refuse to
withhold judgement. It is not the Bible they are concerned about but themselves.

It is arrogance to claim your book is right when you cannot know it. It is okay
to say you think it is right but to go further than that is bigoted arrogance.

RIGHT THEREFORE INSPIRED?

The Church says the Bible is inspired therefore all it says is right. Should we
be saying instead that the Bible is right and therefore it is inspired? Then why
the Bible only? Why not consider any book where it contains correct statements
to be inspired? A statement being right does not mean its inspired.

And if a book is right does it need to be inspired? God could inspire Moses.
Moses can write a book based on what he has learned. That book could be right
though not inspired because it is based on what God taught Moses. And suppose
Moses learned some mundane way? Again the book would not need to be divinely
inspired.

Inspiration is just a scam to get you to accept a book as the truth BECAUSE its
teachings are suspect.

CONCLUSION

Divine inspiration of prophets and scriptures is impossible. It is so absurd
that it is plainly a scam by men to get you to believe that their writings or
the writings they want you to submit in obedience to, to do what they want.
However the doctrine is the only way to distinguish between a religion that
claims to be from God and one that is from man and doesn't seem to care.